I brought with me a couple of, they’re definitely prints, I think on bamboo. If you look really closely, I think they’re done the way comic books are. I had to look really close, and when I was a little kid, which is when I got these, I didn’t notice and I didn’t really care because I got these in Watertown, South Dakota. […] All I really know about it for sure, my great-great-grandfather, a man named Arthur Calvin Melette was the first governor of [South] Dakota after being its last territorial governor, it made the transition from territory to state, and my entire family made a pilgrimage there for some sort of centennial thingamigiggy, I don’t really know, I was maybe 7 years old so I wasn’t really paying attention. But the highlight of the entire trip for me was when we went to this really amazing shop. It had these gold lanterns hanging from the ceilings, and all these fantastic things, and on the walls were a whole bunch of these. I, being a 6 year old, I really wanted one, but I couldn’t decide between this really cool tiger over here, and this other one which also has a really cool tiger, but it also has a fantastic dragon. […] Trying to choose between the two of these was tearing me apart, so my mom who was with me, took pity on me. […] These are really the only art, aside from a Star Wars: The Phantom Menace poster, these are the only art objects that have been with me for most of my entire life. The truly fantastic thing about these to me is, not just the quality of them […], but the fact that things that as far as I’ve been able to tell don’t have a word of English on them found their way to a town in Watertown, in a Dakota, and were the heart’s desire of a 7 year old kid. If there were a museum to house these I guess it would be the museum of ubiquity of cultural memes.

These belong in the Museum of Ubiquity of Cultural Memes

Exhibited by Steve Closs

Transcript edited by Serena Washington